Dominic Rouse

$195

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A 15-print folio
from the imaginative mind of Dominic Rouse

Dominic Rouse would be the first to admit that his use of the camera and the darkroom are unusual. Photography as a wide and varied community of folks is a very big tent indeed, and his corner of photography has few fellow travelers — a contemporary like Jerry Uelsmann comes to mind — but when I think of his work, I think more of the painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, and René Magritte. Rouse does not photograph the world; he makes photographs of his mind.

Looking at his images is a profoundly different experience than looking at, say, an Ansel Adams photograph. With Adams, one prepares for his photographs by reading John Muir; with Rouse one prepares by reading Lewis Carroll or even Freud.

His images are challenging because the questions he asks in his images are challenging in themselves. In my interview with him in 2007, he quoted Picasso who said, “Computers are useless because they only give you answers.” Rouse’s photographs pose far more questions than they answer. I suspect that is precisely his intention.